Can Massage Therapy Help Treat Depression and Anxiety?

Depression and anxiety are two of the most common mental health conditions in the United States. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 7% of American adults suffer from depression in a given year, and 18% have an anxiety disorder. While there are many treatments available for these conditions, massage therapy is often overlooked. In this blog post, I'll discuss how massage therapy can help treat depression and anxiety.

Massage therapy has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression and anxiety. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that massage therapy was effective in reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety in a group of patients with major depressive disorder. The study found that massage therapy was especially helpful in reducing rumination, which is a type of thinking that can worsen depression and anxiety.

Massage therapy can help to reduce stress and promote relaxation, both of which are helpful in treating depression and anxiety. Massage therapy can also help to improve sleep quality, which is often impaired in people with depression and anxiety.

While massage therapy is not a cure and should not be used as a substitute for medical care, it can help alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety. Massage therapy is generally safe, with few side effects. If you have little or no experience with massage therapy, it may be helpful to talk to your doctor or mental health provider before starting massage therapy, as massage may not be appropriate for all people. If you do decide to try massage therapy, make sure to find a qualified massage therapist who has experience working with people with depression and anxiety.

As someone who has experience with anxiety myself, I am sensitive to the needs of those struggling with depression and anxiety. If you have questions before scheduling your session, please don't hesitate to contact me.

How Often Should You Get a Massage?

I get asked a lot by new clients how frequently they should get a massage, often in relation to whatever specific issues they hope to address in our sessions.

A lot of massage therapists will probably tell you once every couple of weeks, or once a month. My answer is usually this: There are some situations where you need to have a sequence of treatments in a short period of time; an injury or condition is affecting your daily quality of life, and two or three sessions in a week, or a session once a week for two or three or four weeks would be the most beneficial, until the condition is more manageable.

Otherwise, if you’re seeking massage for ongoing maintenance and general wellness, I don’t think the specific frequency matters so much, but instead, the fact that you do get a massage at a regular frequency, whatever that means for you. I have clients I see once a week, twice a month, once a month, and once every two months. These clients typically schedule their next session at the conclusion of their current one. I think that’s optimal, provided it works for your schedule and budget. It’s said that planning your vacation in advance and being able to look forward to it is just as important as the time you’re actually on vacation. I think similar works for regular massage sessions (or any other kind of self-care, for that matter.) Seeing it on your calendar and knowing it’s in your future is part of the experience.

Are there benefits to getting massage more often? Absolutely. When you get a massage once a week, or once every two weeks, for example, you feel less the need to address everything in a single session. We can address the upper body only, or even just the neck and shoulders, if that’s where your tension is in one session, and focus on the lower body the next. But the more important thing is that you’re scheduling regular sessions for whenever works best for you.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I am fascinated by the stories we all tell about ourselves - to ourselves, and to others - and how those stories shape our daily lives. Kurt Vonnegut famously said in one of his novels, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to me.”

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I am lucky to have little trouble falling and staying asleep. I have a two-year-old son who is experiencing separation anxiety during the night, so “staying asleep” and sleeping in general are relative terms right now, but on the whole, I sleep well. I don’t suffer insomnia. Give me five minutes, and a semi-comfortable surface, and I can fall asleep easily. (This is sore point for my spouse, who often takes at least an hour to fall back asleep if she’s woken during the night.)

I say all this to say, I don’t have much knowledge in the way of sleep medications, such as Ambien.

I learned something interesting about the sleep aide recently: One of its side effects is short-term amnesia. Another interesting fact: Studies have shown those who take the drug get an average of only an extra 18 to 29 minutes of sleep a night.

It’s possible that Ambien doesn’t so much increase one’s quantity or quality of sleep, but simply makes one forget about not sleeping, It might work primarily by taking away the memory of not sleeping. A good portion of a person’s anxiety and fatigue the next day often lives in that story.

“I didn’t sleep well last night.”

That’s not to say the drug doesn’t work. It just may work differently than the way we commonly think it does.

In the first few months of my son’s life, there were a lot of nights I got only two or three hours of sleep, and a handful of nights where I got no meaningful sleep at all. One of the ways I powered through was to get out of bed at the appropriate time, make some coffee, and try to “forget” that I hadn’t slept.

That wasn’t a great substitute for actual sleep - I certainly still had a good amount of new “parent brain” - but it certainly helped.

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“I have horrible posture at work.”

“I bet I have the most jacked up back you’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t do near as much exercise/yoga/stretching as I should.”

Massage clients frequently tell me all the ways they don’t do, or are not, enough. How they don’t take as good of care of themselves as they should. In my first few years as a therapist, I unfortunately fueled that tendency in my clients. My training was clinically-based, and we were taught in school to highlight and point out areas where clients can improve, self-care exercises, stretches, etc. This lead to me often giving unsolicited advice about what was “wrong” with my clients.

I’ve grown out of that, luckily. I still provide this information, but I do my best to make sure the client is open to hearing those suggestions from me. Sometimes, people just want to get a massage and relax, and maybe work out some tension and knots, and don’t necessarily want to be told what they need to do better when they just want to enjoy their post-massage glow.

I now strike a balance in my practice of giving self-care advice when it welcome, and perhaps just as important, when I have a client who is mentally beating themselves up for not being/doing enough, I encourage them to give themselves more credit, and hopefully, disrupt the stories they tell about themselves about not having good enough posture, not stretching enough, or the like.

Self-care is important. Self-betterment is important. But it’s also important to feel you’re doing the best you can.

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“The body hears everything the mind says.” - Naomi Judd